


To many, to a few

by azul_ora



Category: Marvel
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, American Sign Language, Canon Disabled Character, Deaf Character, Erik Has Feelings, Happy Ending, Light Angst, M/M, Poor Charles, Sign Language, and by that i mean he's not evil in this, bc i just wnat happy fluffy good erik mkay?, he really gets the short end of the stick ehre
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-11
Updated: 2016-12-11
Packaged: 2018-09-07 21:59:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8817748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azul_ora/pseuds/azul_ora
Summary: To Charles, hearing and listening have always been two entirely separate things.





	

**Author's Note:**

> **PLEASE READ**  
>  Warnings for descriptions of violence/pain, child abuse and mistreatment of a disabled character, some referenced, some explicit. If any of this triggers or squicks you, please consider before reading.

The child is born screaming. The doctors assure her that this is good: this is normal, it’s a sign of a healthy child. Even so, the volume of the screams is greater than anything she’s ever heard before. They say that this is unusually loud, but that that’s not a bad thing. They tell her the child is a boy. “Charles,” she says. “His name is Charles.”

* * *

Age two, and Charles is a quiet child. He responds mostly to touch and movement. When his mother offers rattle toys, he turns away.

* * *

Age three, and Charles hasn’t spoken a single word. Sometimes he cries, but mostly he’s silent. The doctors pronounce him clinically deaf. Nothing we can do, they say. They say she should learn sign, and encourage him to learn that as his first language, rather than English.

She squares her shoulders, and she says she will not have a mute son. She remains as clueless about sign as she was before.

* * *

She teaches him to lipread, and to speak. When he mispronounces a sound, she hits him. He does not repeat mistakes often.

He learns to speak, to read people’s words from their mouths.

She does not send him to school. Proud she may be, but stupid she is not. She hires a tutor and explains she has a deaf son, but that he can speak and lipread and read, so the tutor does not need to know sign.

Charles hates every second of it.

* * *

He’s five. He tries to show his mother the Other Speech. She screams and calls him a freak. He reads the words from her lips, but he cannot hear what she is saying.

* * *

He’s eight. He finds his ‘mother’ in the kitchen. He knows it isn’t her. He uses the Other Speech that he’s been practicing for a while now. She understands, and sinks back into herself: a small, blue girl called Raven who holds out her hand and speaks in his head.

She sleeps in his room that night. He doesn’t know if she notices him crying gently into his pillow because _he heard her, inside his head if not with his ears, maybe he’s not broken._

The next day, he goes to his mother and his stepfather and he slips inside their heads, makes them believe that Raven is their child. He cannot find it within himself to feel guilty. They will not deny her this, not when they have taken so much from him.

* * *

Another family comes over for a formal dinner. They sit around a table, dressed in formal clothes. The table is long, their guests are at the other end, and they are laughing but Charles cannot see what they are saying.

He tries to use the Other Speech to pick up on the vestiges of their conversation that permeate through the air, invisible, and Raven throws him a look.

He does not need to read her mind to know what she means. He ducks his head and does not talk. Later, she climbs into his bed and apologises, but she says they cannot let anyone know: just as she must be blonde and not blue, he must be deaf and not hearing.

His heart breaks.

* * *

His life becomes a loop on repeat.

_Don’t use the Other Speech, Charles._

_Let me do the talking, Charles._

_You pronounced their name wrong, Charles._

Meanwhile, Raven gets better at using Other Speech – telepathy, as he learns at age nine – to communicate with him.

The first time she shows him what music sounds like, he cries from the beauty.

* * *

Once he’s ten, he convinces his mother to stop making him learn with the tutor. He gives the tutor over to Raven, and studies on his own. His mother knows he’s advanced beyond his age, and she lets him.

He wonders if he knows how to use his mind so well because of the Other Speech (it will never be telepathy within the confines of his thoughts – he uses the word with Raven, but to him it cannot describe the nature of how he thinks).

He wonders if he knows how to use his mind so well because he’s had only his thoughts for company for so long.

He digs through the books in their library a hundred times, but he cannot find a book on sign language, and something inside him breaks.

* * *

He comes across the word ‘mutation’ when he’s eleven and studying biology. He looks up the definition, and that leads him to a basic explanation, and that to theories, and from there to radiation and gene therapy.

Raven finds him at three in the morning, digging through the library. He turns to her and in a flood of excitement, uses the Other Speech to share what he’s learned.

Two days later, she calls herself a mutant.

* * *

His parents die when he’s fourteen. He does not speak at the funeral. Raven says a few words, but he does not know what they are. It is raining, and he cannot see her mouth. She tells him that the service is silent as traditional, but he can feel the buzz of minds all around him.feelHe takes comfort in the fact that he is not alone in his lack of grief.

* * *

Two weeks later, he travels into town and goes to the nearest bookstore, where he buys three books - all the books they have - on ASL. He brings them home, sets down on the small kitchen table, and says in a voice he cannot hear, "I am going to learn this, because it has been stolen from me for too long. You are welcome to do the same."

They study together for hours on end until sign comes more naturally to Charles than speaking, and Raven spends most days in silence, save laughter which Charles feels as vibrations in the floor and joy radiating from her mind.

* * *

The two abandon Westchester as soon as they’re sixteen. Charles is tired of the estate, of the rolling grounds and dusty corridors. When Raven asks why it unsettles him, he signs, "It is silent."

For anyone else, the words would mean nothing, but she can hear him.

"Yes," she replies, fingers soft and slow. "It is."

* * *

They get an apartment in Oxford. With the money the two have been left, they could afford a palace, but they get a bedsit. Charles and Raven have never had an issue with sharing a room – they put in two beds, but sometimes, if Raven is particularly tired or just wants to be blue and feel beautiful, or if Charles’s telepathic migraines are unusually bad, they curl up together.

They make sure that if they pick up people from bars, they always go back to the other person’s place.

* * *

They both get into Oxford – Charles, a course on genetics, Raven, aeronautical engineering. She takes a course on clinical psychotherapy on the side. She waits tables at a restaurant and he works in a local bookstore.

When they’re at home and not working, he reads, a mixture of classics and newer novels. He juxtaposes Shakespeare and To Kill A Mockingbird with sci-fi and fantasy. They live mostly off of his baked goods, cakes and biscuits, though Raven cooks sometimes. Just simple stuff, though, given the one time she’d tried to make something fancier it had resulted in a blackened mess that set off the fire alarm.

She shrugs, buys a motorbike, and the two of them earn a license each. She works for a local pizzeria, delivering door to door. He asks her, does she not find it boring? She replies that the feel of the motorbike, of all that power, is like nothing else in the world.

They both join the university's Deaf/HoH group, which leads to no shortage of hilarity as they slowly work out the subtle and not-so-subtle differences between BSL and ASL. Raven buys a few books on BSL, and between her aeronautics and Charles's genetics, they find the time to work out the main (and most relevant) differences. Whilst they're alone, though, they sign in ASL, the movements quick and uninhibited.

* * *

They study in very different ways.

Raven works constantly. When she’s not working on her laptop or on paper, she runs equations using a calculator and her skin. Most days, her arms are covered in black pen depicting scribbled equations that are in some way relevant to what she’s doing. Her classmates ask how much it hurts to scrub all that working off at the end of the day, and she smiles and replies, not so much as they’d think. When she’s done with a certain section of working, a ripple of blue floods across it and her skin is clear again.

Charles doesn’t understand how she can keep all of that in her head all the time, but she’s top of her class, so he doesn’t question. He’s always known that she’s smart. Never judge a book by its cover, he says, especially when its cover can change in the blink of an eye. Blonde is her disguise for the blue genius within.

Charles works quite differently: in long stilts at the labs, dissecting genetic material and DNA. Despite the noise that the labs can sometimes bring, he can focus. His classmates say that in some ways, his deafness must be a boon, not a burden. He begins to think of himself a little differently.

* * *

No-one knows about their mutations, and they have a little fun with them, sometimes. Charles takes notes in lectures, to his friends’ astonishments, just by listening to the thoughts of the lecturer, rather than the words. Raven switches forms, walks up to random people on the street, says odd phrases, and then ducks away. Both of them enjoy sex, and both are more than a little adventurous, and given they hang out at the same bars, they tend to pick up similar types of people. When Raven is arrested for indecent exposure ( _see: fucking a nonbinary person with absolutely killer red hair in an alley behind a cinema_ ), she’s not in her usual form. She pays bail, switches back to her blonde form and doesn’t turn up to the trial. When Charles is arrested for indecent exposure – or more accurately, when he’s _found_ – he wipes the mind of both the police officer and the guy he’d been sucking off, and then scarpered.

Of course, there are the downsides to their mutations, as well.

Sometimes, Charles’s shields drop despite his best efforts to keep them up. When’s he’s tired, or panicky, or not thinking straight. The morning that the whole of Oxford had to deal with Charles Xavier’s hangover being shoved at their heads was all three. In the afternoon, Raven (who’d felt the hangover from the other side of campus) found him and helped calm him down enough to pull his shields back up. She held him close as he shook and sobbed in a secluded corner of campus while students walked past and pretended not to notice them.

Then there’s the time when Raven’s skin reacts quite horribly with the medication she’s taking, for some reason. The rash starts on her chest and spreads across her back and face within half an hour. She takes two days away from uni and throws out the medication. After that, it very slowly begins to fade, though it leaves impermanent scars. It’s three weeks before the rash completely vanishes, and another three months before her skin returns to its previous appearance. She takes a note of the active compound in that medication and makes sure never to take it again. It’s another harsh reminder that mutant biology isn’t the same as human.

* * *

Both of them receive top grades in their courses. They both graduate top of their classes. Charles is invited to give a speech. He spends a while writing it. When he goes up to the podium, he begins, "I’m Charles Xavier and I’ve never heard anyone speak my name out loud."

Raven’s listening. After he finishes, he makes his way over to her, and she hugs him close. She steps away, face half-amused half-exasperated and asks, "Since when did you need to hear things out loud?"

"Never," he replies. "Not when I can speak to you just fine like this."

And then they’re both smiling, and both of them can feel everything, unsure of where she ends and he begins, and they think, _we could stay like this forever._

Charles decides to take a Master’s, keep studying, while Raven gets an internship in a planeyard. She draws up designs for vehicles while he tries to find blueprints for DNA. They stay in the same flat. They still share the bed when they need to feel like it’s all going to be okay. Charles can feel the pulse in her wrist and her neck, but he’ll never be able to hear her heartbeat. But that’s okay, because he doesn’t need to.

* * *

And then, there’s Moira McTaggart, and there’s the memories in her head, a woman dressed in diamond and a man who can disappear. She struggles to hear what he’s saying in the loud bar. He does not. It's his favourite bar for a reason - it's well lit, and her mouth is perfectly clear. So is the fear present in her mind, the revulsion, the hatred.

He gives the presentation to the CIA bosses, unable to hear his own words beyond the vibrations in his throat. They don’t believe him – of course they don’t, he probably sounds insane. That’s okay. Charles has never been worried about how he sounds. He reaches into their minds and speaks more clearly, but still they refuse to understand.

For all that he’s the deaf one, he’s always found the rest of the world seem to be the ones who have the most trouble listening.

* * *

And then, and then, there’s Erik Lehnsherr.

Charles drags him back above water, and Charles cannot hear his words nor read his lips, but the thoughts are perfectly clear.

_how the hell was he in my head how do you do that_

_telepathytelepathmindreadertelepathytelepathmindreader_

_is he like me is he like me ishelikemeishelikeme_

_he sounds beautiful_

Once they’re on the boat, Charles turns to Erik and says, hands moving in conjunction with lips, "Your mind sounds beautiful too."

Erik smiles.

* * *

Charles and Erik and Raven go back to the CIA base, and they meet Hank McCoy. He shows off his feet, and Raven is laughing and rippling through appearances to reciprocate, and Charles finds himself laughing too.

Afterwards, Raven says it was liberating, showing off who she was. She says most of the time, she feels invisible, silent: she feels like the world’s deaf and dumb and blind, and suddenly, everyone can hear and see and _understand_.

He understands. Of course he does. Charles knows all too well that there’s a difference between listening and _listening_. He tells her that she’s beautiful no matter what skin she wears: she’s beautiful for herself, and that shows through in her body, her blue not least because it’s _her_.

She smiles.

* * *

They take time to get to know each other, the two of them. Erik gladly accepts Charles into his head, gives him free agency. It’s terrifyingly liberating, and Erik’s mind is more beautiful than any other Charles has ever seen.

Charles uses Cerebro.

Erik’s mind is still more beautiful than any other Charles has ever seen.

They go recruiting, and they tell Angel that she doesn’t have to be reduced to her sexual allure. Charles tells her she can be smart and kind and good. Erik tells her this doesn’t mean she has to give up being beautiful, only that she has the choice of who she makes herself beautiful for.

She says yes.

She says later, to both of them, that she enjoys being beautiful, but not for everyone. She only wants to look beautiful for those who will see, to sound beautiful for those who will listen.

Charles smiles.

* * *

They find others: Alex and Sean and Darwin. An Army prisoner who flings lasers from his chest, a runaway who sends sonic booms, and a cabbie who adapts to anything. Moira looks on with muted disapproval and disgust. _Inhuman_ , Charles catches her thinking.

A couple of soldiers from the base who have two weeks off-duty apiece show them the base: a Latina woman in her late twenties named Sofia shows them where the guest rooms are, and a Japanese-American person who introduces themself as Ash shows them where the kitchen is. All of them spend a day messing around, baking and cooking and laughing. Charles hears Ash thinking, _they’re just normal people after all._ Sofia thinks, _they’re amazing. And Ash is stunning._

He plays matchmaker, a little. It’s his way of saying thank you. When the lot of them end up sprawled together in one of the rooms, watching Star Trek, he makes sure Ash and Sofia are curled up together in an armchair. He and Erik share another, while Raven, Angel and Hank take the sofa. Alex and Sean lie on the thick rug on the floor, and they watch _The Trouble With Tribbles_ until they’re all laughing, sides splitting.

Charles sends a thought to Erik. _They’re not all so bad, you see? Not all like Moira and Shaw._

And Erik takes a deep breath and raises his hands. Charles finds himself blinking back tears as Erik signs, very slowly, hesitantly. "Yes, I understand. There’s more to them than what we thought."

Something inside Charles, something small and silent that broke a long time ago, slowly begins to heal.

Charles raises his own hands and signs slowly, so Erik will understand, "Thank you."

* * *

And then Charles and Erik are away and the others are attacked, but they stand together. Angel shows him what happened, later.

_“You don’t belong here, do you?” Shaw asks._

_“Yes, we do,” replies Angel. “Maybe some of them are bad, but that’s not everyone. And it was these people who showed me that I could be beautiful when I wanted to be. We’re not going with you.”_

_“Charles saved me from a prison, without making me feel like a prisoner.”_

_“Erik saw me for who I am, not for my skin. He knows as well as I do about racism, and I don’t intend to leave someone like that behind me if I can help it.”_

_“All of this gave me something to run towards, not away from. They spoke to me when the rest of the world wouldn’t listen.”_

_“Raven showed me it’s okay to be different, that my feet are no more or less perfect than the rest of me. I’ll put up with the bad if it means I get all of this good.”_

_“Charles is my brother. I’d bring the world crashing down before I’d betray him.”_

When he surfaces from the memory, tears are tracking down his cheeks.

He finds out, two days later, that Ash and Sofia survived: they were out on a date when the attack came.

He has inadvertently saved their lives.

* * *

And then, the warning: one week, before the ships get to Cuba.

Charles and Raven take the others back to Westchester.

* * *

Sean shatters glass and flies. Charles can’t hear his screeches, but he can feel the exhilaration flooding Sean’s mind. It’s rich and heady and incredible. Sean and Angel play tag, chasing each other through the skies. She spits fireballs, learning to send them faster and further than ever before, honing it into a weapon. She hits targets as she swoops past, wings fluttering.

Hank runs, and he runs fast. He builds tech and he researches.

Alex learns to control his lasers, using Hank’s prototype. One time, Hank brings in his serum for ‘curing’ mutations and tells Alex that it’s the new target. Alex blasts it to shreds, and Hank smiles.

They test how many different things Darwin can do. He swims in the lake, diving right to the bottom. He can survive a vacuum. He can turn his skin to stone, to metal. He can walk through fire and ice.

Erik turns the satellite. "The point between rage and serenity," Charles signs, and projects some of the silence that pervades him into Erik’s mind. It’s meant to calm him, but it sends a single tear trickling down Erik’s cheek. He kisses Charles, long and slow and sweet, and replies, "It does not matter that you cannot hear the world. Raven and I, we will always speak to you. You will always be able to understand us, I promise."

It’s soft and tender and perfect. Charles links his arms around Erik’s neck, and rests his forehead against Erik’s. And for a shining moment, both of them can sense each other’s minds, can feel everything.

Charles thinks that’s the moment he falls in love.

* * *

Then, they go to Cuba.

* * *

Making one of the Russian warships sink the missile ship probably wasn’t Charles’s best idea ever, but to be fair, he was trying to prevent a nuclear war, so it probably wasn’t his worst either. The Russian missile ship sinks pretty quickly, and Hank sends a quick _little warning next time?_

And then Sean is diving down and Charles has a location on the sub and Erik lowers down on the wheel and he’s grasping at the sub and it’s not _enough_ and Charles raises his fingers to his temple and sends, _Remember, the point between rage and serenity_ and the submarine is rising, rising out of the sea and shedding water as it ascends and then-

A whirlwind of a man ascends from the submarine and smashes into the Blackbird like a thunderstorm. Charles is sure that the others are probably screaming – that’s all they seem to do, whenever they’re scared, scream – but he can’t hear them, and he’s silent as ever as Erik is flying upwards and pinning him to the – roof? ceiling? who knows – of the plane.

The Blackbird crashes, and it crashes hard. Both the plane and the submarine smash into the beach, and Charles can feel Erik holding the two of them up, the others strapped into their seats. Once the plane stills, Erik floats the two of them down gently. Charles catches Moira as she tumbles haphazardly out of her seat. Angel catches Sean and turns him the right way up, and Hank tries to help Raven down only to collapse with her landing on top of him. She quickly scrambles off and looks the other way, as Erik helps Darwin down.

Charles comes up with the plan quickly – Erik goes into the submarine to find Shaw, Angel and Sean deal with the teleporter and Alex and Darwin take down the man with the whirlwinds. Raven, Hank and Moira stay with him inside the Blackbird’s wreckage while he guides Erik to the void.

He doesn’t know what happens in there. Just that suddenly the void vanishes and he can sense Erik and Shaw is... gone. He sends, _A_ _re you okay? What happened?_

_Shaw’s dead._

Charles allows himself a moment’s relief.

The four of them step quickly out of the wreckage of the Blackbird to see the teleporter, Sean and Angel flashing all over the sky and Alex and Darwin standing over the unconscious body of the man who threw hurricanes.

Charles reaches out for the teleporter’s mind, but it’s slippery, vanishing before he can get a hold, until suddenly it’s _there_ , he’s got it, and he forces the teleporter – Azazel, the name whispered in his head – down to the ground next to the other of Shaw’s mutants – Riptide – then knocks him out. Sean comes screeching down, and Angel lands next to him.

Charles looks over to the submarine, and Erik climbs out, Shaw’s body floating behind him. He runs over and tackles Erik into a hug and feels the thud of vibrations in his feet as Shaw’s body hits the earth but that doesn’t matter because Erik is kissing him like Charles is oxygen and he’s drowning.

Then Erik stiffens and Charles feels it and pulls away, looking up with soft, questioning eyes. He quickly signs, "Erik? What’s wrong?"

Erik’s eyes aren’t on him: they’re tracking over the ships sitting out of the bay. He frowns and steps towards the shore. Charles hurries alongside him, taps him on the shoulder to get his attention. "Erik? Talk to me!"

He turns to Charles with sad, pained eyes, and finally signs a response. "Their guns are turning to us, instead of each other. Wipe out all of us in one fell swoop."

Charles turns towards the ships and extends his reach, looking into the ships, American and Russian alike-

_-destroy those inhuman freaks-_

_\- убить их всех-_

-and he stumbles backwards for a second, overwhelmed with the waves of fear and animosity pulsing off of them. He turns to Erik, a tear trickling down his cheek. Erik reaches out, gently wipes it away, and signs, "Don’t worry. I won’t let them kill us."

The missiles fire. Erik reaches out one hand and halfway across the bay, their engines stutter and die, and they plummet into the sea.

Charles lets his breath flow out of him in a great rush, relaxing."It’s okay, we survived, it’s all o-"

And then suddenly Erik grabs him but not fast enough and pain blazes across his back, hot and sharp and Charles thinks he might be screaming but he can’t even tell, he’s falling, and he didn’t even hear the gunshot.

He collapses into Erik, and looks up in time to see Hank tackle Moira and send her flying, the gun thrown from her hand, and then a tug in his back and the bullet is lying in Erik’s hand and Erik rolls Charles onto his back, head in Erik’s lap, staring up at the tearful eyes of the man who saved the world for him.

Erik looks up at Moira, lying in the sand with Hank holding her down with a knee on her back. He reaches out deliberately and the gun lying in front of her face crumples inwards.

"Erik." He looks down, and Charles is crying, tears streaming down his face, hands shaking. "I can’t feel my legs."

Erik kisses Charles like he’s oxygen, but it’s too bad: they’re both still drowning.

* * *

He wakes up on an operating table in Westchester. He tries to sit up, and suddenly he can’t.

He panics.

_Why can’t I move why can’t I move oh God-_

And then Erik is there, moving swiftly across the room, hands flashing, bright with panic, "Shh, shh, Charles, it’s okay, calm down."

Charles clings to him and tries to breathe.

* * *

Hank tells Charles afterwards that he had made Moira forget everything that happened, forced Azazel to take them all back to Westchester, wiped his mind too and sent him back to the beach with Moira and Riptide.

Hank tells Charles afterwards that he’d done everything he could to save Charles’s legs, but he was no surgeon and there was nothing to be done.

Hank tells Charles afterwards that he’s going to be paralysed from the waist down for the rest of his life.

Hank tells Charles afterwards that he’s made Charles a powered wheelchair. _It’s only a prototype at the moment,_ he explains, and Charles reads the words from his mind, _but it should get you around the school at least._

Hank tells Charles afterwards that Erik and Raven didn’t leave his side the entire time.

Charles clings to his sister and his lover and tries to believe that it’s all going to be okay.

* * *

He learns how to use his wheelchair. They get an elevator installed in the house, so he can get around, but he soon realises it’s not that simple. He has to relearn how to get dressed, how to shower, even how to get out of bed in the morning.

Erik and Raven help, and slowly, he begins to adapt to his new life.

Over the following days, he notices the others beginning to sign as they speak, slowly and hesitantly and disjointedly at first, but gaining in speed and fluency and confidence as time goes on.

Hank shows him the new version of Cerebro, rebuilt in the lower levels, and he uses it. They find their first student – a black girl in downtown Manhattan who glows in the dark, whose father broke her arm for being different.

He goes to meet her, heaving himself into the passenger seat of the car whilst Erik drives and Hank and Raven sit in the back. She agrees to join the school as soon as they explain what it is. She packs her entire life away into three boxes and asks to come straight away. Upon her request, Charles makes her parents forget they ever had a daughter, and she comes with them. And so Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters begins.

Charles uses Cerebro to change her legal documents, so that he and Erik are her registered guardians. She’s joined a week later by a ginger boy who can walk on water and, a week after that, a Latina girl whose hair deals electric shocks to whoever touches it.

Over the next few months, they gather more students, and the house comes alive. They all teach classes, and Hank works on improving Cerebro and Charles’s wheelchair.

Charles teaches the bi-weekly class on ASL. Every time he wheels into the room and sees most every student in the school already there, silently chatting, his heart warms a little.

* * *

Charles has an overarching awareness of the minds inside the house all the time, except when he’s asleep. He can feel when people are euphoric – like when Hank finally finds the glitch in Cerebro’s coding – and when they’re sad or in pain – like when a student falls down the stairs and fractures her arm.

And of course, there’s Raven, thoughts flitting like a wildfire, directed at him whenever she wants to tease him or whenever she gets too excited and wants to share something.

And there’s Hank, telling him about the latest upgrades to Cerebro or suggestions for classes.

And there’s Sean, proudly reporting successes with the kids and/or Alex.

And there’s Angel and Darwin, sending updates on training the kids to control their powers.

And there’s Erik, whispering _liebling, schatz, I love you._

Deaf Charles may be, but he knows the world will never be silent for him.

**Author's Note:**

> Don't own 'em - if I did, it would be a lot more diverse.  
> Title is from the quote 'Listen to many, speak to a few.' by William Shakespeare.  
> Note: edits made as of 23/12/17 because of some of the details about Charles's hearing loss and his attitude towards sign language were a result of me writing this very quickly without much knowledge of the Deaf/HoH community. I have, since originally writing this, done more research and found out more about the Deaf/HoH. I apologise for the questionable content in the original edit and for any upset it may have cause Deaf/HoH readers. Given this is set in the same timeline as First Class and the first cochlear implant was invented in 1961, it's entirely possible that an implant would not have been available to Charles as a child, when his mother might've forced him to get one, and as he grows older, he doesn't feel the need for one.  
> To clarify: any text that is in italics is thought and/or telepathy, and anything in quote marks is either signed or spoken verbally.


End file.
